Moving to Dublin

Some of you may already know, but probably most don't.

I will be leaving my home city of L'Hospitalet and moving to Dublin the second week of December.

This is a huge change for me since I'll stop living with my parents and live on my own for the first time of my life, also in a place where they don't speak my mother tongue, so it's both scary and motivating.

This also means I'll probably have less time for KDE since I'll have to do the boring real life cleaning/cooking stuff i don't do at the moment so you all will have to live with less bugging about "const &" by me.

It's been a very interesting year working with the cool dudes at Miraveo and i really wish them luck for the future but the company i'll be working for had a monetary offer i could not really refuse without trying to see what they do have to offer.

BTW I'm not saying who I'll be working for because the papers i signed said so many things i don't really know if i can say who I'll be working for, so don't ask.

Interesting times ahead.

KPovModeler looking for a new maintainer

Andreas Zehender is stepping down as KPovModeler maintainer so if you want to introduce yourself in the world of 3D, Qt, KDE, et al, working on KPovModeler will surely be a good experience! Don't miss it!

Jargon is bad

Aaron was talking the other day on how using jargon is bad. The real problem is how to know if a word is jargon or not.

Example follows:

Yesterday my grandmother was bit by something she qualifies as jargon. She bought a new printer, one that can hold xD cards inside and print directly from there, when plugging the xD card she was told by the printer LCD "Do you want to format the card? Formatting the card in printer format will make it faster bla bla" and, she answered "Yes", and all the photos went to the heaven of photos.

The problem here is that we all know formatting means erasing, killing, vanishing the contents, but my grandmother did not. So should "format" considered jargon? Or maybe we should keep using format but on the confirmation question mention "erasing" too?

Okular Junior Job: Kill qApp->processEvents() from fontPool::locateFonts

The title says it all, fontPool::locateFonts, part of the DVI backend (generator in Okular jargon) is using qApp->processEvents() and that is baaaaaad. The code is located at kdegraphics/okular/generators/dvi/fontpool.cpp and it should be straigh forward to port away from using processEvents to a signal/slot mechanism.

Interested people please drop by the #okular channel on freenode or to the okular mailing list.

Another free software kernel

Symbian just made their kernel Free Software so if anyone is interested in real time, multitasking, SMP-ready kernel that is in use in lots of phones, you have something to hack on now :-)

Gluon sprint + QtDevDays

So last few days i've been in munich for the Gluon sprint and the Qt Developer Days.

Before starting my summary i want to thank the KDE e.V. and Qt/Nokia for paying the trip to Munich, the accommodation, letting us use the Qt/Nokia offices in Munich, giving us free entrance to the DevDays and also free opportunity to do the Qt Certified Developer Exam (easy if you are a seasoned KDE dev i'd say (hope i pass it :D)).

That said, lets start :D

Gluon sprint started friday at 10pm for me when i got to our hostel, there i met with Sacha and Sandro, had some drinks and went to sleep waiting for the next day.

On Saturday, HarriF from Qt/Nokia picked us up in our hostel and guided us to the nice offices Qt/Nokia has in Munich, there we started some presentations about gaming creation IDEs so all the participants of the sprint could see the idea of what Leinir wants for Gluon Creator. Mid-afternoon, Knuth joined us and cared for us for the rest of the day, even getting us some food for dinner when the waitress was hesitant because it was already late.

On Sunday we started to do some work involving designing, refining of classes, creating d-pointers for classes, improvements on some classes to make it more easy to be cross paltform, etc. HarryF joined us for a while and he got himself parts of the sample gluon game (Blok) working on the Mac, cool stuff.

Monday continued with work on Gluon stuff with fregl, karli and SaroEngels joined us due to the proximity of the DevDays. The very monday afternoon we headed to the Hilton where the welcome reception sponsored by Tieto. A company that was the Platinum sponsor of the event, that said to have lots of Qt experience but whom i had never heard of. They were actively showing plasma on the S60 emulator, no idea if they have anything to do with the plasma port to that platform, if they have not it's a weird thing to show.

Tuesday was DevDays talks start, it all began with Nokia VP for Qt speaking of the Qt Everywhere idea (we had a Qt-based coffee machine :D) which includes everything you can think of except the iPhone and Android (some conflict with Nokia interests?). The starting video showed Marble and KDE screenshots, nice touch :-) Lars spoke about the next generation of Qt followed by Walter Bender talking about Sugar, that uses pygtk and when he asked if Python Qt would be supported he got a no, there's some company called riverbank that does it but Qt/Nokia does not do it. I wonder what happened to PySide that not even Nokia employees talk about it... Then ¿our own? Matthias Ettrich came out to the stage with a laptop with a huge KDE sticker running Ubuntu and spoke about the Declarative interfaces thing, cool stuff, but mostly for the smartphones i'd say, also it is bad that it won't respect native style of "widgets".

After lunch talks continued without anything worth mentioning except the shameless plugs for QtCreator in each of the talks (guys we know it's not a bad tool, no need to say "look what it does, it's cool") and the unprofessional way of referring to the iPhone as "the phone from the fruit company" and Android as "the robot from the ad company". Grow up.

Then we headed for the 15th floor for some drinks while the rooms where prepared for dinner where the Fact or Crap Quizz Contest was held, my table (the gluon team table) was just 1 correct answer away to qualify to the final, so close to those shiny phones....

Next day i attended some more talks about features that seem specifically developed for smartphones (gestures/animations/stateMachine) and also two KDAB given talks, one about Multithreading by Mirko (with some Steven Seagal resemblance) and Qt Kwan-Do by Mirko and Till.

All in all a very nice experience, more suit-y than Akademis but still nice to see that much people attending a Qt meeting, being the largest Nokia developer oriented event this year.

And last but not least, Sandro is luckiest man in earth, he won two consecutive raffles, take that statistics :D

Thanks to git people

git 1.6.5 was released a few days ago including the quiet flag for pushing. Now our l10n logs will look less messy without all those "Writing objects %" lines. No idea if it was because i'm from KDE or not, but git people were very helpful and implemented my request quite fast. Thanks!

Dear lazyweb: intel graphics problems

Here i am trying to open a svg file with inkscape and i get this.



Any idea what can be the problem? Fedora 11 uptodate with Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device.

What a sprint can do for you

Today is the last day of kdegames/gluon sprint, and it's being quite productive as you can see on http://gitorious.org/ gluon is now in the Most Active projects list gluon-team is in the Most active teams list.

Of course this is powered by my powerful sitting on chair skills :-P

poppler-data 0.3.0 released

I've just released a new poppler-data package based on the new free cMap files by Adobe. This now makes poppler-data a free package so you should go and bug your distro to install it by default.

Projects: be open or die

So i search for poppler on google and find http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/poppler.html a page from the Linux From Scratch project that mentions how to build poppler. I spot a couple of factual errors there and after some searching i see i have to mail lfs-dev@linuxfromscratch.org which i do.

After an hour or so i get a mail saying my mail has been rejected to enter the mailing list.

After querying the admin of the list i get "IIRC, you are not registered with the list." That's it, not a "please for bugs use thisOtherService this list is for core contributors", not even something like "Please register, we prefer people to do so it makes sure follow ups are not lost", nothing.

So good luck with the project, if you don't want to include fixes it's up to you, but you should make contributing easy otherwise you'll end up with no incoming people and you'll project will die sooner or later.

I'm glad KDE community is generally more welcoming than that.

Qt for S60 not as cool as real Qt

Ok, Qt for S60 *is* real Qt since it was merged in mainline Qt not too much ago, but it still has lots of things that make it not the very good toolkit we are used too. For example Qt 4.6 in S60 will have a QFile that won't support unicode names in files. :-(

KDE in Barcelona Software Freedom Day

This 19th of September is the Software Freedom Day. As every year Caliu is organizing the event in Barcelona, this time at the Centre Cívic de Les Corts, from 10 to 20h. Aleix Pol and me will be there with a KDE talk at 15:00.

1984

So yesterday i finished reading 1984, a book written in 1949 about a future 1984 where the world is divided in three mega countries in permanent war. The book talks about Winston Smith a mid-level member of The Party, the dictatorial organization leading one of those 3 mega countries, and how he hates the establishment and how he tries to subvert the system. It also features "telescreens" a fictional two-way camera/television that sees everything and controls everyone.

The book is the first Orwell novel i read (though i read an adaptation for kids of Animal Farm when i was younger) and i found it rather interesting and as a classic in science fiction i think you should read it. The topics it covers are still up to debate: Are "low level classes" with less problems happier than people that know more? Do revolutions just mean changing who is in charge but "exploited people" remain in the same situation? Is government surveillance a good thing? Is torture a valid method to achieve government objectives? Is true love a thing that can not be destroyed?

How not to do a poll

Today i was traveling on the TramBaix back home and noticed a leaflet that said "Imagine the new Diagonal", that said the city council wants to reorganize the Diagonal (one of Barcelona's most important avenues) and wants the citizen feedback. I'm a good citizen so i read the first question, it says:
The Diagonal should be:
a) A space where neighbours and citizens can meet and walk
b) A space to travel using public transport
c) A space to have shops
d) A space with green areas
e) A space for traffic, but with less private cars than right now

And then i saw it made no sense keeping reading, all of the answers are targeted to what the city council wants, so whatever you answer, they will be happy, there's no answers like (not that i agree with them)
x) A space for traffic, but with more space for private cars than right now
y) Remove the TramBaix, it's useless

So basically this is a sham, a fake poll and whoever did it should be ashamed, but it seems we are in a time were politics are not ashamed anymore of any kind of wrongdoing and citizens don't seem to care much :-/

Trobadour knowledge about QGraphicsScene

If you do not want your QGraphicsView to repaint itself totally do not delete QGraphicsItems without removing them from the QGraphicsScene first.

Is the X11 engine slower than raster just because of the drivers?

Here was i profiling KSquares and discovered that when painting an antialiased dashed line using the Qt X11 engine you hit a code path in which Qt tries to detect for each dash of the line which other dashes intersect with it, that's right a O(n^2) calculation that makes no sense, that since you are drawing a line the intersections it will find it's that a dash only intersects with itself. So seeing things like that i wonder if the Raster engine is faster because X11 drivers suck we have been told or it's that the X11 engine code is not as good as it could be. I've checked and the raster engine has no such "bad" loop

Even more symbian woes

Symbian has pthreads support, but it sucks, yesterday i discovered it has a maximum number of threads you can create, that is

void *dumb_thread(void *)
{
pthread_exit(NULL)
}

function_somewhere_in_my_code()
{
pthread_t t;
int error = pthread_create(&t, NULL, dumb_thread, NULL);
check_error();
pthread_join(t, NULL);
call_function_somewhere_in_my_code_though_a_timer();
}

will end up returning error 35 (EAGAIN) in pthread_create after some calls, depending on the phone it can be 20000 or 60000, and yes, that's a lot of threads, but if you are using threads for fire and forget jobs it's relatively easy to hit that number, so i've been forced to implement a thread pool just to workaround yetAnotherSymbianBug.

And yes, this has nothing to do with KDE, except that the more i code in Symbian the more i appreciate the rock solid API provided by KDE and Qt

Symbian stringstream woes

Here i am, wondering why the hell Symbian code is so bad after all the years that have passed since it was created. I was bitten by the "select() memory leak" bug some months ago and now i've been bitten by the "stringstream is not thread-safe" bug. One wonders if such simple things fail[1] what more can be hidden in the deeps of the Symbian code, i think it's time for the Symbian Foundation to open up the code already.

[1] Ok, actually the "select() memory leak" got fixed (or so i was told) after i reported the bug in the Symbian Foundation bugzilla and the "stringstream is not thread-safe" seems to be fixed either in the OpenC/C++ 1.5.5 beta that can be dowloaded from the trolls site or in the new firmware for the N78 (can't tell which one fixes things as i updated both)

Help translating KDE

KDE has a strong translators community being one of the most translated software all around but as all areas of [Free] Software development the more people helping the better, so you should consider going to http://l10n.kde.org/teams-list.php and contact the team of your language. In case the point your team is marked as inactive or the contact for your team does not answer, you should contact the general list for KDE i18n where we'll give you further guidance.

"Why should i translate if i already understand english?" will you ask yourself. There is no definitive answer to that but i can give you two reasons:

• As any contribution to Free Software will make your karma go up and you'll be part of something BIG


• It will help you improve your english and your native language knowledge. That's because most of the times you understand english enough to understand the sentence, but transforming it to correct native language in a semantic and sintatic way is not always simple so you end up improving a lot both your English and your native language skills

As i said all languages need help, but the ones of this list are more in need as their former translators don't seem active anymore: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Breton, Chinese Hong Kong, Croatian, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Faroese, Igbo, Indonesian, Kabyle, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Kiswahili, Lao, Latin, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Nepali, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Swati, Tamashek, Tatarish, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Urdu, Uzbek Venda, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu